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Morgan Stanley’s Global Currency Research Team produced a report in August 2013, and James Lord, an Emerging Markets Strategist, wrote “EM Currencies: The Fragile Five.” The Brazilian real, the Indonesian rupiah, the South African rand, the Indian rupee, and the Turkish lira were identified as the “Fragile Five” of troubled emerging market currencies.

A Morgan Stanley report in August 2015 identified ten troubled currencies. A Bloomberg Business headline on August 16, 2015 read, “Morgan Stanley’s Fragile Five Swells to Troubled 10 in Selloff.”

This year, Morgan Stanley declared the Brazilian real, the Indonesian rupiah, the South African rand, the Indian rupee, and the Turkish lira as the “Fragile Five,” or the troubled emerging market currencies under the most pressure against the U.S. dollar.

The phrase “Fragile Five” seems to have been first coined by Morgan Stanley analyst James Lord in August. Since then, the phrase has gained increasing traction as a catch-all for the most concerning emerging market economies – which together represent around 7 percent of the world’s economy.

Institutional Investor
JANUARY 27, 2014
BRICS, MINT, and a Fragile Five: Where EM Groupings Go Wrong
Acronymsand cleve labels might be cachy. But as Turkey shows, they can be pretty tenuous as well.
By Sarfraz Thind
(...)
The term fragile five was coined last August by Morgan Stanley’s research group. It gathers five emerging markets beset by current-account deficits and with a heavy reliance on foreign capital inflows.

Bloomberg.comMorgan Stanley’s Fragile Five Swells to Troubled 10 in Selloff
Ye Xie and Anchalee Worrachate
August 16, 2015 — 12:00 PM EDT Updated on August 17, 2015 — 2:43 PM EDT
Forget the “Fragile Five.” These days, strategists at Morgan Stanley are worried about what could be called the “Troubled Ten.”

That’s how many nations they say are particularly at risk since China devalued the yuan. While the analysts haven’t used the term themselves, it’s as good a description as any for the currencies—from the Brazilian real to Peru’s sol and South Korea’s won—which have trading ties making them susceptible to a slowdown in the world’s second-biggest economy.